Raditude, former pop-rock phenom Weezer's seventh and latest full-length album, is just another example of lead singer Rivers Cuomo gone wrong.
The body and soul behind awesome powerhouses like 1997's Pinkerton and 1994's "Undone - The Sweater Song" has scraped the bottom of the barrel with a cheap, childish pop-punk production that actually features a track called "In The Mall." In recent years, it's seemed like Weezer has been on a bit of a decline from its early genius gems, but if you thought "Beverly Hills" was bad, think again.
The album's first single and opening track "(If You're Wondering If I Want You To, I Want You To)" spins a tale about a Slayer t-shirt, smeared mascara kind of summer romance behind the backdrop of a tight, Patrick Wilson-led percussion piece.
Pent-up teenage sexual frustration peeks out of lines like "So make a move (make a Move) 'cos I ain't got all night," which seems a bit too homeroom for a band whose lead singer will be celebrating his 40th birthday in June. The beat is fun and the rhymes are cute, but the whole deal reeks of pubescence, something a band from the 90s should have outgrown by now.
Raditude's best offering is "Put Me Back Together," the album's fifth and most heartfelt track. Cuomo's voice falls back into its once-unstoppable higher-pitched twinge for a moment as he soulfully wails about a destroyed relationship, making the listener feel for a fleeting instant as if he or she is listening to a lost Blue Album track.
A steady drum beat keeps the mood energetic, and an epic bridge and guitar line seals it all into place.
One of Raditude's worst tracks is "I'm Your Daddy," an insipid, repetitive piece that tries to recapture the fresh sound found in something like The Green Album's "Photograph," but fails miserably. Cuomo's chorus line, "You are my baby tonight/And I'm your Daddy," comes off as creepy rather than cute.
It's not that Raditude is such a terrible album that it will cause your eardrums to bleed; most tracks are catchy enough to inspire the average radio listener to turn the dial up on his or her car radio on a long highway drive home.
But the stale lyrics, bland instrumentation and overall clichéd composition shows such a marked decline from a band that brought the world masterpieces like "El Scorcho" and "Say It Ain't So" that it's almost sad for an old school Weezer fan to upload any of this to his or her iPod.
Cuomo is too clever to write a song with a line like "We both watched Titanic/and it wasn't too sad." Buddy Holly would be ashamed.
